You see, I’m going to MozCon! And I love presenting stuff! Perfect storm! So I set out to craft the world’s greatest speaker pitch in the world (trademark pending). When I found out the odds of getting selected were roughly 20:1, I decided to try to shift the odds a bit with some shameless self-promotion, so here it is laid bare. My speaker pitch for MozCon (even though the lovely Jen Lopez says it won’t have any impact).

If you dig it and think this would be valuable, tweet the ish out of it for me, okay? All you have to do is click the button below. Thanks!

MozCon Speaker Pitch

Topic Idea:

Proving the value of SEO, paid search, and social efforts can be hard — particularly when you’re dealing with local, service-oriented business clients. No matter how hard we might try to entice their site visitors to fill out an online form, a lot of conversions sneak “off the radar,” as prospects pick up the phone to transact business.

In “10 minutes in nerd heaven,” I’ll reveal how to track these phone call conversions within Google Analytics at a fraction of the cost of paid services like ifbyphone (3 cents per minute vs. 8 cents per minute). I accomplish this task using Twilio’s API and a simple PHP script (less than 100 lines of code).

This presentation will also provide an inside-out look at Google Analytics, as we dissect the __utm.gif calls made by GA so that we can fire pageviews from the server side (not using javascript) to get our call data into Analytics. This has practical application for other use cases where a pageview or event needs to be registered without the use of javascript.

Most people will laugh at least twice during my presentation.

Also, it’s worth noting that I’ll provide the PHP script I use to enable phone tracking as a download with my presentation, so it will be very easy for people to actually put this stuff into action.

In my day job, I work with both big and small clients on their organic search, paid search, social, and analytics needs. I spearheaded the transition from Omniture to Google Analytics for Hershey’s (the candy company) and have integrated call tracking into GA for our smaller, local clients.

If you’re still not sure about my ability to entertain and provide value to your audience, check out this video of me rapping about my mustache (when it still adorned my lip): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEx0hQSknJo

I’d Love Your Comments

I believe Jen that this likely won’t influence SEOmoz’s selection of speakers… but I still think there’s value in posting it. I’m not exactly a pro at getting picked to speak at events. I’ve presented at lots of small meetups and was VERY fortunate to be picked to present at the SEOmoz Search Church meetup… but I’ve gotten no response from some of the other large conferences I’ve pitched in the past.

I’d be thrilled if you’d let me know how my pitch could be improved. Did my humor not come off well? Did I pick a topic that’s too narrow for the proposed audience? Was I too charming and witty? Let’s talk about pitching conferences. Tell me how to get better.